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You are hereWashington Post: Derrick Bell’s widow: Unaware of second hug between prez and prof

Washington Post: Derrick Bell’s widow: Unaware of second hug between prez and prof

By FZ - Posted on 10 March 2012

-By Erik Wemple

March 9, 2012- One-time Harvard Law School Professor Derrick Bell has taken a beating in the conservative media this week. Bell taught at Harvard at the time Barack Obama was enrolled there as a student. Breitbart.com showed a two-decades-old video of Bell hugging Obama during a protest in favor of faculty diversity.

That embrace and its backdrop, claim detractors in Breitbart World, signaled a lot of things about our current president. Like his agenda to sow “racial division and class warfare” — according to conservative media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart in a February address. (Breitbart died not long thereafter.)

He writes a futuristic science fiction story about race, but it’s really telling the story of the civil rights struggle. He thinks that basically white people sold blacks out and then Jews, who pretended to be helpful to black people during the civil rights struggle, backed away when they saw it was no longer in their self-interest. That’s what he believes about the civil rights struggle. And he believed it when he was teaching at Harvard Law School and Obama embraced him. And he believed it several years afterwards. And he had fights, by the way, with other black faculty members at Harvard who said that some of Bell’s views were so extreme that they were very problematic. So, this is not about racial diversity, it’s not about gender diversity. Derrick Bell was the Jeremiah Wright of academia and Barack Obama embraced him and endorsed his views.

Amid the hubbub over Huggate, the Heritage Foundation has attempted to discover whether this radical prof ever visited the White House. ABC’s Jake Tapper suggests that he didn’t.

Too bad Bell himself cannot speak up on these matters. He died last fall of cancer at the age of 80.